SNIA Experts on Data
Listen to interviews with SNIA experts on data who cover a wide range of topics on both established and emerging technologies. SNIA is an industry organization that develops global standards and delivers vendor-neutral education on technologies related to data.
SNIA Experts on Data
Accelerating Tomorrow's Data Storage Technology and Standards
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Discover how SNIA is redefining the future of data through collaboration and innovation. Join Scott Shadley, Jason Molgaard, and Shyam Iyer to hear how SNIA's initiatives, particularly in accelerating data, are blending storage solutions with data-centric strategies to drive the industry forward. The conversation highlights the significance of standardization in data management, emphasizing the importance of collaboration among competitors, discussing:
• Overview of SNIA's role in developing standards to accelerate data
• Importance of collaboration and shared expertise within SNIA
• Insight into the Computational Storage Technical Work Group
• Discussion on the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) and its framework
• Sustainability's role in technological advancement and innovation
SNIA is an industry organization that develops global standards and delivers vendor-neutral education on technologies related to data. In these interviews, SNIA experts on data cover a wide range of topics on both established and emerging technologies.
About SNIA:
Welcome to the SNEA Experts on Data podcast. Each episode highlights key technologies related to data.
Speaker 2Welcome everybody. My name is Eric Wright. I'm the host of the SNEA Experts on Data podcast here. I'm the co-founder of GTM Delta and I'm doing some really cool stuff with this group today because we are talking about the overall SNEA programs and something that we're doing as a series, and we've had a chance for us to think about not just what is SNEA doing, but why and the move as we talk about storage centric and data centric and those two things coming together. It's a fantastic opportunity to talk about all I kind of call it the pillars of SNEA in some of the working area, working groups and the practice areas. But I got an amazing group of folks who know way more about this to share than I do, and with that I'm going to ask for a quick, rolling introduction and we'll start with Scott. If you want to introduce yourself then we'll jump on in after that.
Speaker 3Hi everybody. My name is Scott Shadley. I currently sit on the board of directors of SNEA, as it can be seen by my shirt, and I work for Solidime as a long-term strategy. So I spent a lot of time over the last six years now that I've been a part of SNEA as a board member, and probably two decades of working within the SNEA infrastructure, if you will, as a member of a lot of the working groups. So very excited to be here and kind of talk about the next level of support and effort for what SNEA is up to. So before we jump into too much more, I'll hand it over to Jason to do a quick intro.
Speaker 4Hello everyone. I'm Jason Mollegaard. I'm co-chair of the Computational Storage Technical Work Group at SNIA. That's my evening job. My day job is actually with Soladyne, where I'm a storage solutions architect working on advanced storage technologies and pathfinding. I'll turn it over to Shyam.
Speaker 5Thanks, Jason. My name is Shyam Iyer. I am the chair for the Data Accelerator Interface Technical Working Group inside of SNEA. I'm also an elected member of SNEA's Technical Council. For my day job, I'm a distinguished engineer at Dell in the office of the CTO, where I'm responsible for looking at futuristic concepts, things that we would want to make products eventually.
Speaker 2Fantastic on SNEA even for folks that are brand new to it and talk about Accelerate and really what this area of work and practice is inside the overall SNEA organization.
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely so. Snea is what I would classify as the greatest way for competitors to collaborate without getting in trouble or doing anything like that. So it's a group of companies that have gotten together into an industry organization and we can sit down and work on some very unique, new, innovative maintaining all this stuff that has to do with the overall market as it relates to what used to be known as storage and networking specifically. But as the world has evolved, we've kind of moved to this concept of a data-centric, because we all know that in order to utilize storage and networking, you have to have something that needs that, and that's called the data. So we've realized that you know, with this move to the world of AI and everything like that, that people are really more attuned to the concepts of where the data is and what you're doing with the data. And it still applies within the organization and within what Steve is up to.
Speaker 3In this particular session, we're actually talking about one of our six new pillars that we've kind of formulated within SNEA, and we call it Accelerate. And so, if you couldn't tell already, for those people that do know who SNEA is, we brought in our experts in computational storage and our experts in SDXI, because both of these working efforts that are being done within SNEA are driving ways of accelerating the ability to do something with data as it relates to storage and networking. So, with all of that, it's a great opportunity for people who aren't as familiar with SNEA, or people that are and want to know more about exactly what we're up to. We're going to give you a little bit of an overview of these different types of work efforts and things that we're doing within SNEA.
Speaker 2And I think that's interesting too because, looking at the different groups and having worked with SNEA myself, like as both a community member and helping out some of my companies I've worked with in presentations and getting connected, like you said, scott, the ability for you know competitors to be able to collaborate towards innovation. And we've talked with some of the other folks in the working groups already and some of the other pillars and like that's the theme that really jumps out Now, while you and Jason may share a daytime email address, sean, you know, as somebody else who is coming from a different side of things, how have you found that sort of opportunity to work with Scott and Jason and some of their folks? But what does the SNEA collaboration and innovation opportunity mean to you and your team, versus where you would only be internally facing in your thought processes before?
Speaker 5So yeah, I guess to me it opened up an opportunity into interacting with a whole bunch of experts from different companies with their different use cases, with their different specialties. You know, I think SNEA is an amalgamation of different experts who deal with data very intrinsically, and so just to have the opportunity to work with such technical talent has been very gratifying. You know, sometimes when we do research in our own companies we do it with certain use cases, certain requirements in mind. But to come to an open standard that SNEA fosters or an open collaborative place that SNEA fosters, you get to know about the different use cases, the different requirements, the different implementation designs that everyone cares about, and then the whole is much better than the individual parts.
Speaker 2So a design that comes out of it is actually more sound, more secure, more full-featured than what you would have done if you had just done it within the cocoon of your own company, than what you would have done if you had just done it within the cocoon of your own company, and I guess, when we think about the idea of accelerate, maybe that's a good chance if you want to jump in on this one, scott. What?
Speaker 3does accelerate mean in the context of some of the stuff we're going to talk about today? Yeah, I mean, from that perspective, accelerate is kind of a fun thing to think about, right? So we've got all this cool stuff in the marketplace and if you're in the industry, you're used to terms like NVMe. There's a new term, cxl. You've got our friends over at NVIDIA that are having fun with a lot of GPU things. You've got all the storage vendors providing their products and you've got all the storage vendors providing their products, and you've got amazing companies like Sean's organization that can collaborate all that together and deliver it to an end customer.
Speaker 3At the end of the day, you me and fellow consumers of all of this technology are trying to do things faster, faster by way of acceleration, and so you can kind of think of it as the idea here is putting the gas pedal to technologies that have historically been gatekeepers in the ability to get work done, and that's kind of where we put the focus of a lot of the things that we're doing. So you've got, like, for example, the computational storage work that Jason's driving, and we'll give him a chance to kind of highlight what's kind of unique there and how SNEA is actually driving some unique efforts in regards to that, so I'll hand it over to Jason.
Speaker 4Yeah, sure.
Speaker 4So in computational storage, we've worked on a couple of different things that we've made publicly available for the industry to help foster innovation in computational storage. So there's an architecture and programming model that you can freely download from the SNEA webpage, as well as a computational storage API, and both of them can be downloaded and with those two technologies, it's really enabled everyone to get behind a common set of terminology, a common set of architectures and a common understanding, which is necessary in this industry. If you're going to have a technology like computational storage take off, you have to have multiple vendors that are offering competing products. Otherwise, customers are going to shy away. They're going to say it's a sole source and that's going to be very concerning to them, and we don't want that. We want everybody to go off and create something. We want open standards that allow people to innovate but yet be aligned, and then that leads to compatibility and some element of uniformity, so that customers can have confidence that if they buy from vendor A or vendor B, they're going to be able to make something work.
Speaker 2To go a little bit further on that one, jason. What is the sort of work that in computational storage we'll start there in what you're doing with the working group, what does collaboration look like as like activities, and what are sort of the artifacts you talked about? Obviously the API and spec and lots of other things that are available it's. I'm just curious, what are the, the things that we we step away from as a result of this collaboration? It's not just us getting around and you know, spitballing ideas and giving each other a big group hug. There's real legitimate artifacts that have great, great value to the industry coming out of here.
Speaker 4You're absolutely right, and that's exactly what we have in the form of these documents, and so that collaboration has definitely taken the form of yeah, there is some sitting around and you know, talking, there's no doubt about that but at the same time, you know we're everyone is bringing forth their ideas and sharing them and their use cases and how they envision it would work. And there's definitely a spirit of collaboration in terms of we want to make sure that everybody's view is heard and, if at all possible, incorporated into the documents that we prepare. That way we're not turning a blind eye to someone's great idea that maybe happens to be different from ours. We want everyone's unique contributions to be represented and a part of the work that we produce, because they're thinking about it differently than I am, for example, and that's great. And so let's take everybody's ideas, put them all together and figure out how to make them work.
Speaker 4Now, obviously we can't just have everything and it could be a little bit difficult to piece together, but if we at least think through ideas, we can say we can find some common ground and say, hey, how about if we do it this way? Would that work? What about that way? And eventually arrive at an answer or a solution that everyone likes and at least all the members who are contributing like, and we can then go forward with that and feel good about it. And, as I mentioned, it is in the form of those two main documents for computational storage at this time and they're not done right. They're working documents. We're continuing to evolve them and work on enhancements and clarifications and new ideas as people innovate in computational storage, and we try to fold that in and and make that part of the, the architecture and the api it's always an interesting thing that people, even we, look at the ieee standards, you know, like we call them rfc's, as if it's a standard like no, it's called request for comments.
Speaker 2It's never done. There's a point at which you kind of mark a 1.0 spec or something that like here is this a baseline? That we say is some version number. But it is interesting that you know this is never the stuff is never done. But the industry catches up along the way because manufacturing and other things that come that are are downstream of the work that happens among SNEA and some of the other you know partner standards bodies, is really driving things that are two to three years out, which is wild.
Speaker 2Because I remember I'm seeing now stuff we're talking about these new crazy ideas in computational storage. I'm like I'm pretty sure I saw a presentation on this three years ago. You know I saw it pre-COVID presentation on this three years ago. You know, before I saw pre COVID, like the ideas are long in the tooth before the manufacturing begins to actually cut those teeth. It's a. It's interesting to see the gap and as a consumer it's not even not obvious. You know how much work is being done amongst this group and Scott, you've been coordinating, leading a lot of this stuff. What have you seen across, even the other working groups and and how this stuff is all coming together?
Speaker 3well, see, I think actually I'm going to jump it right over to sean, because I think letting him explain how sdxi became part of snea is a great example to kind of give you where you're talking about. So I'm going to just gonna say hey, sean, give us a quick 101 on where it came from and how it ended up in SNEA, because this is a great story that I've heard from him before and it deserves to be sold. Thanks, scott.
Speaker 5So let me also kind of take a journey. Before that, let me do a play with words. The smartest thing we did was to call our group a smart data accelerator interface. So we are trying to accelerate data and that's kind of how it fits into the accelerate pillar, and we're also dealing with acceleration of data. And when we say that we're talking about a memory-to-memory data movement interface, which also embeds acceleration, as it does any of the memory data movement, and you're talking about making this a standard in SNEA, I think the question is, snea deeply cares about data and all of its users and end users, the vendors that come together here, deeply care about the data and how it moves, how it gets accelerated, how it gets transformed, and so a memory data mover standard is, of course, something that you would want to standardize within SNEA. And because of the experts that know about the kind of use cases, the kind of data flows in which memory data movements are required and places where memory data movement needs certain kind of transformations, that's exactly where a standard needs to live on.
Speaker 5And so you know we had, before we came to SNEA, we had gotten a group of companies to start working on some of these use cases and we kind of had written a draft about what we wanted to do. But that's when we looked around and where would we want to standardize that? And that's when Sneha frankly so fit in. And once we came into the group, the standard spec started evolving with not just with the small group of companies but to everybody who came in with their use cases, their requirements, and that ended up becoming the one auto specification that we released in late 2022. So last count it was about close to 30 members who have been a member of the working group at various times. Almost 20 odd of them have been contributing members. It's almost hitting about 100 members in individual capacities that are one way or the other part of the group. So it kind of shows you that when you have an idea but you want to work on it on a broader industry space, how can you come to SNEA and actually make it work?
Speaker 5So to just give a little bit more about what the actual standard does, it provides a framework or an interface specification for describing how memory to memory data movement needs to happen. It standardizes all the memory structures that are required whenever memory data movement needs to happen. So now implementations can choose how they want to do the data movement more efficiently, while conforming to the memory data structures that the standard specifies. That also means that now, with the same framework, you can describe new kinds of operation codes like compression, encryption, parity, offloads or whatever your imagination takes you to and leverage the same software infrastructure that is being built to incorporate the standard. So now you have commonality in software, commonality in terms of the interface, and implementers can innovate on which kind of operations, which kind of acceleration that they want to do, whenever users want to do memory-based data movement and acceleration.
Speaker 5And we have made sure that the standard is applicable for virtualized use cases, user-level use cases or wherever memory may be available, not just in host memory but in memory, like you know, cxl memory or, you know, memory on storage devices. So the idea is that as the memory market increases, more such data movers may be needed and more such type of implementations would be required. And SNEA is best suited to play a good role in understanding all these use cases, all these requirements, while leveraging the standard that it is continuing to innovate and develop.
Speaker 2We really hit on something that's important there, sean, is the idea that standardizing at one layer and then innovating above, rather than spending the effort trying to innovate at the base layer, like it's, as the oft you know, misattributed and I don't actually know the real origin, but I'll say it's an African proverb is if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Is, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And it's been, I'm sure everybody from Warren Buffett to whoever has always been named as the source of it. But the truth is we've seen it in action and as an abstraction layer.
Speaker 2That's where people are innovating, and I worked in performance management for a long time and the whole idea is that every abstraction you do, people say like abstractions can accelerate things Like no, that's like saying that shampoo is good for your hair. It does a different thing. It's not good for your hair, it cleans it. Abstractions solve a different problem and invariably you're always adding delay, you're always adding something and it's always going to have some type of negative effect. But then they can begin to do work above that abstraction to find those opportunities, and that can be the proprietary work that allows us to all still be in a large, fantastic, competitive market where we can all succeed. And, most importantly, customers succeed because they win from cross-pollination of ideas. So when someone does come up with a management abstraction that handles multiple storage platforms, it's because we know it's based on a spec that we can depend on and it's not going to be suddenly shaken up with V1.1 of whatever software they happen to produce. So I'm with you on that, how valuable this collaboration is. Scott you.
Speaker 2Oh yes, sushant, go ahead. I cut you off mid-story too, because I want to hear about this SDXI, because this is definitely one of how it came together. Now, absolutely.
Speaker 5Just one more additional point just to kind of get into. You know the moving interface that you're trying to describe is also interconnect independent, which means that as different interconnect or fabric standards continue to develop, whether it's PCIe, cxl, you know now the latest one is UEC and UA link and you know the number of fabrics and links and interconnects continue to evolve. Sdxi is written in such a way that it is independent of these interconnects. So if you want to protect your investments in software and applications making use of an accelerator like this, then you want to invest in something that is not just read to a single interconnect or an interface. And that's kind of what Snea gets it right, because it hears all these different viewpoints from different folks. It makes sure that it is not doing something very vendor specific or specific to a specific interconnect and therefore advantages one vendor over the other, and so it kind of makes everybody come together on some things to solve the real problems, while people can go and innovate on things that can't be solved in this manner.
Enhancing Collaboration for Data Innovation
Speaker 3Yeah, and I want to add to that kind of thing and kind of have Jason jump in here and talk to what he's been up to, because on the computational storage side it's that same building blocks, everything that we've just been talking about. Sneha set forth, as he's already mentioned, this architecture spec. Well, an architecture isn't necessarily an implementation and we did that on purpose and I'll kind of let Jason explain how that architecture has been built upon by a recent announcement from one of our partner organizations as well.
Speaker 4Yeah, you're absolutely right, scott, and so it is just an architecture and provides that framework for everybody to go innovate, which was part of the goal. And so one of the partner organizations that Scott's referring to is NVM Express, where they have come out with some specific command sets for computational storage that fit within that architecture and leverage the architectural concepts that SNEA has developed. And then, in addition to that, the API that SNEA has defined has been explicitly crafted to align with that NBM Express implementation, so that the two documents or the two specs that SNEA has created have provided the foundation and the interoperability with NVM Express, which you know, as many people in the industry know, is kind of the interface of choice today for SSDs and also computational storage drives. As it turns out, that may not be the interface of the future, but the architectural foundation provides that basis for whatever that new interface may be UA-Link that Sean mentioned, for example and I think that one of the things that I think is worth considering or keeping in mind is that, because of all this collaboration that is enabled through SNEA, sham and I have actually gotten together and we've looked at, hey, what if we could combine computational storage and SDXI, and that's exactly what we have been working on as one of our side projects and, the thought being great, we have the ability to do compute in the drive.
Speaker 4Sdxi has the ability to do some transformations. We still need to move data. Can we put these two together and have what the capabilities of SD XI provide the data movement and or the, you know, some of the compute, if you will, from within our computational storage drive? And this work is still, you know, very much in its infancy, but we're continuing to progress on it and we want, you know, to do this continued collaboration across our two groups, because they are they really, because you know, this is the accelerate pillar that we've talked about. It makes sense. If we can combine them and put them together to accelerate even further, then we should do that.
Speaker 2I feel like a lazy person. My side project was I was happy I got the SNEha podcast logo on a Raspberry Pi screen and you are like inventing the future of acceleration across two fantastic working groups. So that's fantastic.
Speaker 3I would. I would have to jump in and just highlight that, because we brought that up and there's now six pillars, if you will, within the organization. It's not like we're siloing either. There is absolutely collaboration across the different pillars.
Speaker 3So you've got the accelerate pillar is talking to people in the management stuff is talking to people in you know everything else in the store security security that kind of stuff so, uh, don't want it to sound like we're siloing it, because I know a lot of major organizations get in these nice silo concepts, but it's such a collaborative organization across the different pillars, across the different working groups you can just see that that you know, if we didn't get these people together in a room and this person from this company, this person from that company would be off doing you know, this kind of blinder work. It doesn't help, and so I kind of look at it as Sneha takes the blinders off and it lets the end customers into. Right, don't get me wrong. We're companies, we're a vendor. Shom is a potential consumer of our my company solution, who also divide, delivers to an end customer. All of us can be part of this. We bring in the end customers too.
Speaker 3It's not just the vendors, it's not just the product makers, it's the software folks, it's the end consumers that all come in and do that. I mean we could spend an hour talking with Jason about how many revisions of the architecture spec happened before 1.0, because a new company would join us, a new perspective would show up and it's like, oh, we hadn't thought of that. So SNEA is an amazing organization for that reason. That's one of the reasons that we put so much effort into it as individuals, as ourselves. We kind of called it our night job right, but we do it because we love it as much as we need to do it.
Speaker 5I want to jump in here a little bit on what Jason talked about the collaboration between the computational storage and the SDXI group. You know, funny thing, computation storage is in the architecture of reducing the data movement, right. And then when you think about what does a data mover need to collaborate with? Something that is trying to reduce the data movement, Turns out to reduce the data movement. You need an efficient data mover that gets the data to the right place where you can compute right. And this is kind of the clicking that we end up having when we have these open conversations within SNEA between different work groups, and that's when we find complementary things and complementary, you know, use cases and architectures that become a lot more elegant than when we started with, right there.
Speaker 2And what was neat was you brought up the idea of security being a part, and we'll talk about the secure pillar as a separate. We've got a full group that we're going to bring together to talk about some of the work in those areas. And I used to joke people say, why do they have to come up with DevSecOps? We have DevOps. Why do you have to explicitly list Sec in there? I said, because you explicitly forgot to ask them to join you on the DevOps journey.
Speaker 2We've totally blasted by security and I've seen it even in the time that I've been involved with SNEA that, as you said, people will be in one working group and realize like, oh, my company and my team can add more to multiple things, or we need to listen to one team to make a decision in an architecture or in another area, and so that ability to be in one place, in one community and have a common goal of, you know, working towards things that can drive innovation. It's very rare to find such great collaboration where it's not just like one partnership on one product release, like we are talking about stuff that won't even be released for many years potentially to come, for many years potentially to come, and yet you're able to work collaboratively together so that we can probably instead of it'll be three years instead of eight, because of the work that's being done in this group.
Speaker 3Don't push us out too far. Yeah, I also would like to kind of bring it around, and in this particular instance, poor Shams, you know, overwhelmed with the two for one kind of thing in this particular instance. But it actually provides us a great opportunity to highlight one of the other aspects of snea, in that we have very amazing technical work being done and I'll give 100 credit to both the guys, in my case, that are sitting on the lower half of the screen. But we also have an amazing marketing and education and outbound group, which is why I sit on the board, because I'm a marketing guy, and I have Jason who helps sit on the technical council for my company, because we do collaborate on technical work, but we also collaborate on promoting, educating, sharing that information out.
Speaker 3And so we have amazing events like the storage developer conference, which is now the SNEA developer conference, again getting to that data-centric opening up for people to think bigger than just storage. And we have things like the Persistent Memory Summit. That went on for a decade. It's become the Compute, memory and Storage Summit. We're bringing everything.
Speaker 3Guys, come on home, bring it all home, we'll take care of it, we'll get it done and then we'll make sure everybody knows how to use it, because we're going to promote that on behalf of the technical work, because you do have a lot of these organizations that are great partners of ours that are very, very technical and they don't know how to kind of get that information out there. So we even collaborate that way where we share space. At events like the future of memory and storage right, the rebranded event that's coming up in August, snea is sponsoring a platform where several of our vendor you know, our collaborative organizations are going to come in and be able to present their content because they don't normally have that wing of their organization, and so that's a great example of yet another reason why SNEA brings so much value to the market.
Speaker 2And it's amazing to me that I had somebody who was somebody who I'd been working with directly as one of my clients and I said, hey, you know you should probably come and check out this SDC, and did so.
Speaker 2And then actually they are 100 percent software, but the work that they were doing, they realized like, realized, like, oh, people are trying to solve this at a hardware layer, but in fact what we're doing fits inside what they're doing. And it was able to develop those partnerships by understanding because, again, if we only look with those blinders on, we can only see what we're exposed to. And by taking the the blinders off, as you said, scott, it's such a great way to say like, oh, wow, there are so many fantastic people in this room that we can learn from. And SDC as the large conference, I know we also did a regional one recently in Austin which was the first of its kind, and hopefully we're going to see more of those sort of more regular regional events. So we don't have to wait, you know, for the annual, although SDC is amazing, but if we can make those regular, I think we'll see a lot more folks that can kind of jump in instead of having to wait for the once in a lifetime, once a year, kind of spectacular.
Speaker 5Yeah, I want to jump into what Scott mentioned about the marketing efforts as well. You know something I want to highlight because Stia has this wonderful marketing arm, it also helps when they go promote this, the innovation that Stia is working on. You know, both Jason's group and my group are part of an award-winning group in the Flash Memory Summit or now the Future of Memory and Storage Summit. So one of the things I joke to my colleagues within Dell and whoever I meet elsewhere is if you want to be part of an award-winning group, come talk to us. And this is kind of where you know Stia does this really well. It not just, you know, works on these cool things, but also makes sure that people come to know about the cool innovation that is happening within Stia.
Speaker 5So one of the first you know demonstrations of an STXI-based technology happened this year at MemCon, and it's not even a SNEA conference, but SNEA had its presence there. You know, I'm pretty sure Competition Storage has had a lot of presence in other conferences. There is going to be the FMS Summit this year and then SDC, where we expect some of the working groups to present some of their material, their artifacts, their collateral, and it always makes good I mean, it's good business sense to make sure that the technical talent is working on something that is relevant for the industry, but also that there is. You know, people can see the evolution of the standard and the implementations through these different product demonstrations.
Speaker 2Definitely and, scott, I got to give kudos. Obviously you've been somebody who I spotted right away in how you did really lead up a lot of you know both. You know doing the work in keeping people collaborating in person and doing presentations All if you go to the SNEA YouTube sites there's all of the previous presentations are there. Definitely it's not a reason not to go, but it's a reason to go back and take a look because we can see this work's being done in the open and you know, I guess the question I would ask is who's the right person? If someone's brand new or thinking like, okay, I've heard of SNEA, I'm seeing this, what's the right profile or persona of somebody that would want to jump in and become a part of Accelerate or even any other part of the SNEA community?
Speaker 3Well, I think just look at the personas you've got here. There's not a persona, if you will, in an organization that we don't have an opportunity to engage in some way. It can be anything from being one of the want to be sadly, like me the face of the organization, because you see my face way too many times in all of those videos. You've got the amazing engineering talent and technical talent that you've got with Jason and Sham.
Speaker 3We've got so many other people in this, you know association of friends and family that it's pretty straightforward. If you're interested, reach out to any of us. We can all point you in the right direction, help you figure it out. We're going to be having lots of fun in the end of 2024, going into 2025, as we launch a whole new kind of. Here is SNEA with a new website and a bunch of fun stuff like that. So if you think you might want to be a part of it, just let us know, because we can find a way to make it happen and the contribution capabilities come from startup academic all the way up to large corporations. We can make that whole. Any persona in one of those kind of fit into different aspects of what we do.
Speaker 2And you got to come and shake the hands of Sean and Jason, say you met two award-winning leaders. But I'll say that is you know, I say it in jest, but like it is true recognition that we can see where cross-collaboration works and where people do get recognized outside of their organization, and that brings a lot back to the organization because it gives credibility to the fact that your organization committed you to be a part of this. And then we start to look at each other and say like, hey, there's probably more partnership in the field than competition, and especially in this, modernized workloads with very different architectures and very different consumption patterns. Now, this is why Accelerate and why Secure and why all these things are so important, because the patterns of workloads are changing and thus the way that we host, operate, optimize and manage those workloads is fundamentally changing. So it's a great time to see what's coming and why. And seeing, like I said, computational storage. I remember seeing it the first time, thinking okay, there's eight places on earth that can use this, and then realizing that there's eight places in my town now that could use that and thousands and hundreds of thousands around the world that are moving towards this stuff. This is not crazy hyperscaler, only level technology that you folks are working on.
Speaker 2So I'll do a quick roundtable because I want to hear what are you excited about in 2024? And I'm going to leave Scott to last because he's got the hardest answer to the question. Jason, you're looking ahead and you've probably got a lot of stuff, especially with what you and Shyam have been talking about. What's exciting that you've got coming up?
Speaker 4Well, certainly from computational storage. We're continuing to evolve the architecture and API and we have 1.1 that we're going to come out with both of those this year. But I think even beyond that, we were talking about events. Events. There's such a huge interest in ai these days and I I'm anticipating a significant number of ai and and how it affects data, how it affects storage, at some of these uh conferences that are coming up, and it'll be really interesting to hear what people are thinking, what they're doing and how they're going to innovate through this new technology. Sean will turn it over to you, yeah.
Speaker 5Yeah, certainly. Thanks, Jason. We are also looking at version 1.1 of the specification. I mentioned earlier that we had 1.0 come out in 22. We are working on 1.1 right now. That should have some interesting set of features that will be of interest for a lot of other people as well. Also, the software ecosystem is growing of features that will be of interest for a lot of other people as well. Also, the software ecosystem is growing.
Speaker 5Our work group has been focused on an open source project that we plan to come out with that helps the accelerator ecosystem, and when we started out, AI was still at its infancy, but we knew we were building an accelerator. And now people are warming up to the idea that an accelerator can be useful for a lot of use cases, including AI, and you know we're excited about that, Just like JSON. There are lots of memory use cases for AI workloads, but also I'm looking forward to more implementations coming out in the open and we've had a sample of that earlier this year, but I'm hoping for more of them to start showing up now that we are slowly growing the ecosystem of them to start showing up now that we are slowly growing the ecosystem.
Speaker 2I can definitely put some self-deprecating marketing in here, because, as somebody who's watched the world become AI washed and we always joke that if you got a presentation you did last year, just rub some AI on it and you can do it again this year and it's tough sometimes for people looking at the stuff that's in the industry and there's lots of like big wow and lots of potential. Again, looking at this, it's like you're you're talking to people that are actually making this happen and talking about the limitations and getting past those limitations versus the big wow marketing. Bless all those fine folks that are doing that. We need to do that as well, but I always appreciate that.
Speaker 2Just this is reality and potential coming together. It's such a there's there's no marketing in the discussions that are happening. We know what we're aiming towards, but it's like here are realistic, prescriptive ways to achieve those goals so that those software companies can do the big plane, big splash. Marketing as such, yeah, but with that scott, uh, you know, obviously you've got plenty of going going around SNEA in general in your life. What's 2024 look like for you?
Speaker 3I almost look forward to when the AI buzz drops a little bit and then we get back to some of the real work, to your point you watch something with AI and it becomes something new.
Speaker 3It's like we've been doing this for so long.
Speaker 3I just look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and realizing that organizations like SNEA and even some of the other ones are doing work that's going to solve the problem that we're creating ourselves, right?
Speaker 3One of the biggest things for me is how are we going to curtail the power problem? Because right now don't get me wrong NVIDIA is an amazing organization, but they're consuming a lot of power today, and there's ways that everything that we've talked about today, let alone the other pillars within SNEA, have ways of helping accelerate that growth without drawing that much more, and it's not going to lower sales for NVIDIA, it's not going to create anything, it's just ways of optimizing that whole ecosystem. Hence, like one of our pillars is optimizing the infrastructure, and so that whole thing is really where I see it. It's the sustainability piece of it around how can we keep the growth effective and how can we start looking at it again from the data center point of view and not just from. This is a component, that's a component. What do I need to do with what I actually just gathered and that's what Steve has been doing a lot of lately, and so I'm looking forward to that, yeah.
Speaker 2And sustainability happens on far more than just Earth Day, which it's come back to Like. I remembered, you know, a couple of years ago, when it was sort of a big push of. Obviously, esg is terribly important in what we're trying to achieve in the world as outcomes, but they're long goals that are not even tangible in many cases. So it's tough for people to look that far ahead and it feels like a bridge too far. So there was this over-marketing of everybody's a sustainability company and every VC was looking for sustainability companies. And then we realized like there's actually sustainability happening every day in the work that is going on here of extending lifecycle, reducing wear, better optimization, better acceleration and transport, keeping the data closer to the workload. So we're not beating the heck out of things and we're reducing power. It's a win across the board.
Speaker 2Exactly, let me tell you you three are fantastic. It's been a real pleasure to share time. I'll give one more quick shout out if you want to sort of give a nod to where we can find you online, and obviously everybody wants to meet these fine folks. If you're not already, head on over to sneaorg, become a member. It's one of the greatest groups to be a part of and contribute to if you can. But if not, just get there to be amongst it, and you're surrounded by fine folks. Scott, I'll let you kick it off and let folks know where they can track you down.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. We're all really generic nowadays First dot, last name at SolidEye, so go ahead and take a look If you're a fan of the x platform. I'm sm shadley on that platform, so happy to chat jason.
Speaker 4Yeah, well, so scott, uh, gave you the recipe for my email address, but uh, you can also uh, um, uh, there is a snea address as well, I guess. I don't know if I know what it is off the top of my head that you can reach me at, but I think it's on the SNEA website and it will certainly come to myself and my co-chair. Otherwise, you know you can look me up on LinkedIn and I will definitely plan to be at FMS and SDC and we'll be happy to meet any of you, sean, and we'll be happy to meet any of you, shyam.
Speaker 5Yeah, I guess I have the same recipe. It's firstnamelastname, shyamire and at mycompanycom. And yeah, you can hit me up on LinkedIn and any of these conferences where we've been notoriously being seen and definitely looking forward to.
Speaker 2I love the fact that we could reuse FMS and find a new. You know this idea of future and it is fantastic. This is a great group. It's a great community. Again, folks, don't forget to check out our other Experts on Data podcast that we've already got. We've got lots of other content that are both on the audio side of the podcast as well as on the video side. You can check out the SNEA website and if you are finding us through that, please give us a little like and a thumbs up. If you're finding us on YouTube, and smash that like button, hit subscribe, whatever the things we're supposed to do as YouTubers. But, more importantly, just get involved and if you have any questions. It's such a great community to be able to post stuff to. And SDC, fms summits all of these are great events Highly recommended. With that, I'm Eric Wright. Thank you again for watching and listening to the SNEA Experts on Data podcast and we'll see you all on the next one.
Speaker 1Thank you for listening. For additional information on the material presented in this podcast, be sure and check out our educational library at sniaorg library.